New for 2023! I’m offering monthly Friday Night workshops on Zoom, starting in February, on a variety of Pagan and witchy topics. These workshops are all stand-alones, so you can take the entire series or just the ones that appeal to you. They are $15 each, with sliding scale options for folks who face financial…
Tag: connection
The very first pre-Christian Deity I served was Brigid, an Irish goddess. As a young musician with a military background, she was easy for me to relate to. “A musician AND a blacksmith? Sign me up! I want to make music and hit things too!” I still consider my time in service to her to…
Many years ago, I was introduced to the idea of selecting a single word for each calendar year to act as an intention, touchstone, and big-picture goal. The beauty of a single word intention is that the simplicity means multiple ways of connecting are possible. For example, my word for 2020 was “Manifest.” One of…
“To be hopeful is to have a form of emotional resilience. A hopeful person believes that although challenges, grief, and adversity occur in every life, somehow things will work out. They believe that they have the ability to figure out a path forward or respond in a way that makes adversity just another part of…
This sermon was offered live (via Zoom) to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Wyoming Valley (Pennsylvania) on Sunday, November 27th. To be human is to be part of the natural world and also oddly separate from it. We technologized so quickly. Electric light wasn’t common in homes in the United States until the 1920s, roughly…
The pagan year ends on Oct. 31 at Samhain (pronounced sow-ehn). Samhain is the old Celtic name for this holiday and the one we continue to use today. As a belief system connected to an agrarian calendar, our year reflects natural cycles. All around us, the trees are in the middle of their annual transition…
This blog is a guest post for EarthSpirit Voices Within the pattern of the Wheel of the Year, Winter Work is a specific area of self-work we engage in during the dark months of the year. As the lessons and wisdom of our time together at Twilight Covening settle within us, we turn our attention…
Stories wield incredible power, and are one of the core shaping influences in human cultures. We can easily look around the world for examples of this: here in the United States, our culture is shaped by Christian mythology. In India, Hindu mythology forms the culture. In Iceland, the Icelandic and Norse mythology of old supports…
We inherit a lot of perspectives from our parent culture. Some of these are obvious, and we begin the work of deconstructing them pretty quickly. I began hacking at the “girls can’t be strong” trope almost as soon as I could walk. As a result, I’ve made good progress on pulling that particular weed out…
Our will – the function of the brain that makes us do things, even stuff we don’t really want to do, can best be viewed as a kind of mental muscle. We have a finite quantity of it when we start the day; using it causes our reserve of willpower to deplete. This is why…